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Is Testosterone More Harmful Than Dht On The Frontal Scalp And Hairline?
- Thread starter Selb
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Hmmm
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All androgens are in high and excessive amounts in balding follicles, DHT is just the consequence of that. Even Testosterone is high and maybe its precursors as well.
Inhibiting AR and 5-AR are therefore secondary targets. Ideally we want to lower androgen synthesis in the follicle in the first place. Seviteronel is the nuclear way to do that, but there is probably a smarter way.
Inhibiting AR and 5-AR are therefore secondary targets. Ideally we want to lower androgen synthesis in the follicle in the first place. Seviteronel is the nuclear way to do that, but there is probably a smarter way.
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Doesn’t seviteronel also block estrogen?
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It doesn't matter. You're balding due to excessively high androgens, not due to lack of estrogen. Consider that if we have excessive testosterone in the HF, we likely have excessive estrogen as well (relative to a non-balding person) since E is made from T.
The primary goal is to normalize the amount of androgens in the follicle. Estrogen is overrated - if you don't take care of androgens, you have to use insanely high doses of topical estrogen to see any result, and even then it only works by suppressing androgens systemically.
Estrogen is primarily used for stimulating regrowth. For that purpose, you can supply it exogenously. But stopping androgens is #1.
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Of course. There is on average 5 times as much testosterone in the balding follicle relative to it's counterbalancing isomer and natural antiandrogen - epitestosterone. Dutasteride only makes this even worse... That's why 5-AR is far from an ideal solution.
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Clearly that theory isn't true for many people.
I think we need to educate people on the fact the archaic theory of "lol sensitivity to DHT" is false and that what we are dealing with is essentially a hormonal imbalance (primarily in the hair follicle) involving the entire cascade of androgen synthesis, including testosterone and possibly even higher. It's just a shame that precursors such as DHEA, androstenedione and others all the way up to cholesterol weren't measured, then we would know where the problem begins.
Using androgen synthesis inhibitors would be a better way to approach this problem, but these are quite problematic, side-effect wise, at least the way currently work (via direct enzyme inhibition). I think what needs to be determined is which pathways implicated in androgen synthesis are upregulated and see if some kind of highly specific peptide can be developed to target that.
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what about oral finasteride working better than topical ? (oral finasteride inhibits scalph dht much less than the topical version). I think a little bit dht is required for proliferation igf1 ?
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Prepubescent boys and women in general have a low amount of androgens and a full head of hair.
If you would need to keep androgens at 0 in order to keep hair loss at bay, men would have started losing hairs way before puberty.
We know that's not the case.
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But why does AR sensitivity change as men and women grow older?
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It doesn't, not to a point where it would matter. This is what happens:
They are primarily talking about ratio in serum however, and here the normal ratio in adulthood is around 1. Balding people have a different problem however:
We have approximately 5 times more testosterone relative to its counterbalancing anti-androgen, epitestosterone, and this is enough to account for all of the traits of androgenic alopecia. No need for any kind of mythical androgen sensitivity when there is such a hormonal imbalance that you can actually measure.
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I know I'm starting to sound like an annoying broken record but that doesn't sound like test was the issue at all. Was he at all by chance taking aggressive aromatase inhibitors as well?
If you've kept your hair mostly barring some gradual attrition through out your late teenage years into your twenties, it should not be merely that hormone which has been circulating in your body for all that time which suddenly and completely decimates your hair regardless of where it is. Something else is clearly at play.
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Interesting. I wonder why this hasn’t been used to diagnose balding early... according to this if you try HRT with epitest would that solve this imbalance?
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Sounds like the logical solution would be to balance it out with estrogen if increasing epitestosterone is not possible, I am myself starting to hypothesize that even though I had a swimmer's physique (thin but good musculature, no gyno) when I was aged 30, that my estrogen was dramatically higher and that was actually the thing that contributed to my hair regrowth after I lost a lot of it in an event which by all accounts looked to be pattern hair loss.
This is kind of what I'm getting at, I think the key for most men will be finding a means by which to balance a hormone like estrogen (mitigating excesses such as weight gain and gyno) with the benefits such as improving skin hydration, vasodilatory (for scalp hair growth) and anti-inflammatory properties improving hair recovery after loss.
Basically, it's not about the testosterone so much as it is about making sure there's a balance of another hormone which facilitates growth and offsets the negatives of test itself.
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Do you know why balding people have such a bad T/epiT ratio in their follicles or have any leads on how to counteract it?
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*cough* estrogen is the easiest path to offsetting this imbalance, the only problem is mitigating side effects.